Flawed Research Blames Police Deaths On States With Most Gun Ownership

David Swedler of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health is the darling of the anti-gun media today with an “old” data report (1996-2010) which claims law enforcement officers are most likely to be killed in those states where most people own guns.

Police officers are most likely to be killed in states where the most people own guns, a new study finds.

The report is sure to be controversial, but it adds a new dimension to a conversation that’s recently been focused more on police shootings of unarmed Americans.

This study looks at who’s killing the cops, and it’s overwhelmingly people with private guns, David Swedler of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health found.

“If we’re interested in protecting police officers, we need to look at what’s killing them, and what’s killing them is guns,” says Swedler.

Bearing Arms interviewed several guns in response to Mr. Swedler’s claims, including a Beretta 92FS, a Springfield Armory XD, and a Walther PPQ, asking the three handguns if they had any particular animosity towards law enforcement officers.

In response, the three handguns merely sat there, primarily because they are inanimate objects incapable of doing anything unless being purposefully guided by a human being.

I’m no statistician and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Express, but even I know that a report that which claims Wyoming (with the highest level of gun ownership in the nation, and zero gun homicides of police in the 15 years of the study) is more dangerous for law enforcement than Washington, DC (which has some of the highest police homicide rates in the nation) is more damaged than a child actor at Jeff Epstein’s private island.

There are a number of critical flaws in Swedler’s report that render it useless from an academic perspective, though it has certainly found popularity as a propaganda tool.

The NRA then dropped the following data bomb on Swedler’s disinformation campaign using a broader dataset:

Law enforcement officer killings have been decreasing while ownership of firearms has been increasing dramatically. From 1993 to 2013, the most recent year of data from the FBI and BATFE, the annual number of law enforcement officers feloniously killed dropped 61 percent, the number killed with firearms dropped 61 percent, and the number with handguns dropped 64 percent, while the American people acquired 140 million new firearms, including 64 million new handguns. In 2013, the number of law enforcement officers feloniously killed by any means,with any firearms, or with handguns was less than half the annual average of the last 20 years.

Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com.
Bob is a graduate of roughly 400 hours of professional firearms training classes, including square range and force-on force work with handguns and carbines. He is a past volunteer instructor with Project Appleseed. He most recently received his Vehicle Close Quarters Combat Instructor certification from Centrifuge Training, and is the author of the short e-book, So You Want to Own a Gun.
He can be found on Twitter at bob_owens.
https://bearingarms.com/author/bobowens-bearingarms/